Tag Archives: satire

There are definitely tendencies in those of us who are really atheists and non-believers in our heads to look back fondly at a time when God and religion filled our childish hearts every Sunday Morning. I have been told that idiots like me with a penchant for writing humor ought not to indulge in making fun of religion and politics. But I look at modern humorists making fun of both those things with impunity and too often end up admiring their success. Because, not only does the the subject of religion provide an easy target for satire and mockery, but we can’t really keep something sacred in our porcelain and breakable human hearts for very long without making sure it is fire-tested. That’s why I intend to take a flame-thrower to it in today’s Sunday Sermon. And I don’t mean I will only make fun of belief in God, but making fun of belief in atheism as well.

Here is a piece of music that gives your heart peace that you might need to play in the background if you really plan to read this purple-paisley-prose post. It is Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major, a very spiritual piece to play for peace of personhood and a pinch of paradise.

Now, of course, the first thing to acknowledge in this idiot’s Sunday sermon is the idea of God Himself.

Is there a God?

Remember, I pass the test for believing what atheists normally believe. That should disqualify me from making the following statement. But remember too, I also identified myself in this essay as an idiot. So, I will say it anyway.

There is a God, not in Heaven, but in us. There has to be. I talk to Him all the time, and He answers me. And I keep asking Him, “If you don’t exist, then how can you be answering me?”

“Well, Michael, you are an idiot. And things don’t have to make sense for you to believe them. But also, I am the part of you that never gives up on you even when you have given up on yourself.”

And I try to look as intelligent as I can as I say, “What…?”

“People, Mickey, my son, have a secret power inside of themselves that, when they are in troubled times and dire dangers, they can reach deep into their souls for it and pull it out to save themselves from the situation in the best way possible.”

“So, if people use this power correctly, say the right words and everything, they can save their lives in any situation and even live on after death?”

“I know you are an idiot, my child, but try not to be quite so idiotic all the time.”

“But people who are very religious believe in eternal life of some kind, don’t they?”

“You are not the only idiot out there, my beloved.”

“So, we don’t get eternal life for praying the right things and doing the right things and fulfilling all the elements of the Live Forever Spell?”

“There is no such thing as eternal life nor eternal torment. But you exist. And existence is eternal. There was no life before you are born, and there is no life after you die. But once you exist, you always exist, even outside of the time-frame of your mortal life.”

“That’s why I call myself a Christian Existentialist, right?”

“You are, indeed, that flavor of idiot, yes. But the Christian part means you have to adhere to Christian values. And not the ones Christian Fundamentalist idiots interpret from the Old Testament. The real ones based on choosing love over hate.”

“So, is that all I need to bring this sermon to an end?”

“Well, you should probably thank William Bouguereau for providing most of the internet images you illustrated this thing with. He died before you were born, but he still exists.”

“Thanks, Billy B. You paint lovely naked angels.”

“And you should recognize that this idiotic thing you have written is not a sermon, but, rather, a fantasy dialogue. And then stop adding more to it like a good little idiot.”

Stop cringing so much when you hear me say it. Texas is where God goes to spend the Winter. Everything is practically perfect in Texas. The weather never varies more than 60 degrees in any single hour. Our tornadoes and hurricanes are way bigger and way more destructive than you get in other States. You think your school systems are producing learners who are spectacularly dumb? They don’t even begin to compare with learning levels here in the Lone Star State. Why, we are the Lone Star State mainly because we don’t want too many stars for our college graduates to count. You think health care in your State is poor quality and high priced? We have million dollar mortuaries that are profitably close, no more than a block or two, from every hospital. We break records in the number of bankruptcy filings over hospital bills while our health insurance providers are making record-breaking profits! You can’t beat that with a stick! No, I mean it. Look how big my stick is, and I couldn’t successfully beat it.

And we choose only the best politicians to represent us. Senator Ted Cruz is not only a former front-runner in the 2016 Presidential race for the GOP nomination, he’s the Zodiac Killer in addition to that. Just ask the internet. If the internet says it, it must be true. And Representative Louie Gohmert of the Texas First District is so bald you can be blinded by the Texas sunshine reflecting off the top of his stupid head. And his name reminds you of TV’s Gomer Pyle, someone Louie is almost as smart as. And he’s a Texas Tea Party Congressman who does Tea Parties so well he makes the Mad Hatter jealous. And Senator John Cornyn tells jokes that make country people laugh. After all, he has “corny” in his danged name!

And Texas motorists are among the best in the country. No, check that, they are the best! No other State has the kind of yearly highway kill score that Texas has. Believe me, pedestrians routinely get bounced off the hood and into ditches, slow-going vehicles and semi trucks are routinely forced off overpasses to beautiful fiery displays of chaos and carnage below. Texas killer grandmas in their shiny Lincoln Continentals with the longhorn horns on the grill will kill you deader than the local rocks. Nobody drives faster and more aggressively than a Texas killer grandma.

We have way more millionaires and billionaires than other stupid States. And we outscore them all in the numbers of poor people and immigrants holding down three jobs at once and still needing food stamps to live.

Yes, everything’s bigger in Texas. We’ve got all y’all beat all to heck!

It has gone beyond the realm of credibility. How can a pumpkin-headed orangutan with a belly full of racial hatred and Islamophobia still be nominally running this country? Has he not committed enough irredeemable sins to be sent to Hell, directly to Hell, do not pass GO and do not collect $200!? I think he stole all the “Get out of jail free” cards before the game ever started.

I have never called this Twitter twit-wit my president. I never voted for him. He did not win the popular vote. He would not have won the electoral college without Republican cheating at voter suppression and Russian influence through email chicanery. But the terrible things he has done so far have not gotten him removed from office. Republicans still treat him as if he were a rational adult. And Fox News is not only putting lipstick on the pig, they are covering him in red, white, and blue frosting and molding him into the shape of an American Eagle. Why do we put up with these tactics?

Perhaps other cartoonists and I are the only ones who see him for what he really is. He’s an ignorant con man put into a position of power by billionaires so they can foist their evil agenda on us and have him rubber-stamp it with faux legitimacy.

The betrayal of the DACA Dreamers was fifteen straws beyond the last straw for me. Who is planning to remove him from office immediately? I want to help. I don’t believe in solving problems with guns, but I can throw a mean banana cream pie of satire and sarcasm. I’m actually Hell at pie-whacking faces. I can attempt to hurt him with rotten tomatoes of jokery and the silly string of mockery too. But even the image of this buffoon in cheap clothing with long red ties is immune to the assaults of mere humor. He never gets the joke, and it is never on him. It is on us instead.

He hurts too many good people by taking away things that they need. He may have damaged the way sick people access health care to the point that many, including me, will die for lack of funds. He de-values human life by pardoning racist criminals like Arpaio and praising malevolent dictators like Putin. He puts human life at risk by taunting another irrational man-baby who also has nukes to play chicken with.

And no effort to remove him from office for crimes which he obviously committed and shows no signs of anything but guilt about will be made by the party now in power.

So what will you do to bring back our country and our supposed sanity? Tell me. I want to hear a plan. I stand ready with foam rubber whack bats to take the best shots I am capable of to help. And I am not the only one. (Truly, I drew none of the cartoons in this post myself. Good cartoonists are legion in this day and age.)

Farbick spent a great deal of effort in the inky darkness talking to Stabharh. The lizard-man was now the closest thing he had to an actual ally. Starbright didn’t count as an ally as she had become more of a lover and indispensible resource. Stabharh told him all about Senator Tedhkruhz’s war on the Galtorrian people and how single-minded ambition had gradually chewed up and destroyed the biosphere of an entire planet. The Senator had been absolutely remorseless and blood-thirsty, at first because it was highly profitable to the Senator’s backers, and then because it allowed him to eat up his betters and defeat the more powerful, but less ruthless leaders that stood in the way of Tedhkruhz’s rise to planetary domination.

“How do you suppose we can preserve ourselves?” Farbick asked. “You seem to have a real knack for survival in all these war stories you have told me.”

“Well, I didn’t exaggerate… too much. Bahbahr and I did survive, didn’t we?”

“Bahbahr is dead now,” Starbright reminded them unhelpfully.

“Yes,” said Stabharh flatly, “I never figured on out-living that fat greedy slug. I have no plan for what to do now… though I would really rather not die if I can put it off at all.”

“I think one of the secrets to survival,” offered Farbick, “is relying on others. Bahbahr obviously owed his survival more to you and your efforts than he did to his own superiority.”

“Yes,” added Starbright, somewhat more helpfully this time around, “and Biznap and I would both be dead already if it hadn’t been for you, Farbick.” She gave him a loving squeeze around the middle for emphasis. He hugged her back in the oppressive blackness.

“So, maybe,” said Stabharh, “we need to stand together and help each other instead of treating each other as enemies.”

“Yes. I like that notion very much.” Farbick knew that Stabharh could not see him smiling because of the pitch darkness, but for his present purposes he thought that was a very good thing. He was not planning on turning on Stabharh, but he thought the key here was in working out ways to get others to turn on their own masters… and he was well aware that Stabharh was very unfeeling toward his former employer as he betrayed him and caused that employer’s sad fate.

“We have to convince the members of the Senator’s surviving crew to turn on him for their own good,” said Stabharh. “They have to see that following that evil lizard-man is choosing their own eventual suffering and death.”

“Why are lizard men so determined to keep doing bad things until they die?” asked Starbright innocently, but again rather unhelpfully.

“We are mostly raised to believe that it is weakness to offer help to others. If someone is weak, they should die… or be killed and eaten.”

“Do you still believe that?” asked Farbick carefully.

“Well, yes… but I now see that you have made the opposite choice a number of times already, Farbick… and have been quite successful because of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“You could’ve killed Bahbahr and me a number of times instead of doing what you did. You gave us a chance to live on and make better choices. Instead of killing me when I was trapped in the force field, you kept me alive until the Senator landed and took us all as his prisoners.”

“At that point, keeping you alive long enough to offer to Senator Tedhkruhz kept him from killing us and eating us immediately. We helped each other in the long run.”

“I think it will help us even further,” said Stabharh. “I think I have a plan in my evil little brain that may just get us out of this terrible dark hole. Wait a minute… thinking this hard hurts sometimes… but… YES! I know just what to do!”

Farbick bit his lip in the darkness. This was either going to be a good thing that helped the three of them, or a very bad thing that at least put an end to their troubles.”

Didn’t you hate it as a kid when Mom or Dad used to pull the royal decree maneuver on you rather than give you the real explanation? “Why can’t we get a new dog to replace the one the junkyard dealer ran over with his truck?” “Because I said so!”

Yes, they pull rank or site ultimate power of authority or simply bully you into letting them win the argument. Nixon said, “If it’s the President of the United States who does it, then it is legal.” Remember, though, that Nixon was forced to resign shortly after that.

Now, Donald Trump says, “The President can’t have a conflict of interest,” by which he means that he doesn’t have to sell off his international real-estate holdings and put his assets into a real blind trust (not one run by Ivanka).

Does he get away with it? It will mean, according to ethics lawyers from both the Obama and Bush administrations, that he will be in violation of the Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution as soon as he takes the oath of office. So, of course he will. Just like Mom and Dad after we buried Scamper.

Obama, as President, was forced to do most of what he did by Executive Order because he was a Democrat, and to a Republican Congress, that means he is automatically in the wrong. Still, he managed to enforce his will with the I said so’s at least until the righteously heroic Republicans achieved their miracle victory with President-Elect Babyhands Von Clownstick. Now, of course, his overreaching abuse of the I said so power to do terrible things, like allow undocumented children fleeing from violence and persecution to take shelter in this country, will now all be undone.

Of course, when a Republican is President, that’s different. Republican Presidents are automatically good and patriotic and protecting the people even when they are lying to create a profitable war in Iraq to benefit Darth Cheney’s Halliburton interests. Lonesome George the Rodeo Clown when he was President issued all sorts of Executive Orders that were not questioned even by Democrats, let alone opposed or reversed. In the hands of a Republican President, I said so power is more absolute than Emperor Palpatine’s use of the Dark Side of the Force.

So under President Donald J (for Joker, revealing his secret identity as a Batman villain) Trump, the “Because I said so!” will be absolute. Rosie O’Donnell, Bill Maher, and Jon Stewart had better get used to the idea of waterboarding in Guantanamo. We had all better get used to the idea of the White House being plated in gold leaf. And I had better hope, having written an essay revealing the Cinnamon Hitler’s actual super power, that nobody actually reads this blog anymore. If you would like to help ease my fears, you could always leave a comment in the comment section that includes the words, “I did not actually read this post.”

Yessir, the Cubs have a chance to win their first World Series since 1908 tonight. They have not won the title since Tinker to Evers to Chance was the double-play combo of poetic proportions. They have never won in my lifetime, and I am quite old. So, there is proof positive the world is about to end.

Yes, I can even describe the mechanics of the thing. Donald Trump will be elected President of the United States thanks to Mr. Comey’s timely reveal of more scandalous emails that he has not read and chuckled about yet. You know, the ones that he couldn’t have actually read yet because they come from potential pedophile Anthony Weiner’s computer, and he had to have a separate warrant from a judge to read anything that may have to do with Hillary, even though probably none of them contain nude pictures from Hillary, and she probably didn’t even write those emails. The world had to know about that right before the election, especially members of the Republican House Committee for examining Hillary’s every boo-boo. So, the Donald will win, because nobody is doing any press conferences on the FBI investigation on his ties to the Russian government through the biggest bank in Russia. ‘Taint important, Pogo.

And once the great orange pumpkin-head is our next president, our health care will no longer be under the misguided protection of Obamacare. Instead, it will will be taken care of by “something terrific” that will make high profits for somebody, and make certain that I will never be able to pay another medical bill (since those who are deceased rarely do).

And, of course, President Pompadoodle will be able to declare that we no longer have to believe in the climate change hoax. The result being that we will soon be able to buy beachfront property in Iowa and Missouri, be able to purchase our breathable air in factory-made brick-form, and possibly grow a helpful third eye from the mutating effects of nuclear radiation.

And, lastly, I would like to thank the late great Walt Kelly for illustrating today’s post. One wonders how a cartoonist can look so far ahead from the 1960’s to do such a fine job of illustrating the problems of 2016? Will miracles never cease? I mean, really, we could probably do with a few less of these industrial grade miracles made out of recycled elephant poop.

I came to Texas from Iowa. I was well-versed in how to speak Iowegian. (I was, don’t-ya-know, and spoke it fluently, you-betcha.)

Then I arrived, fresh-faced and ready to change the world as a twenty-five-year-old teacher, and began working in a mostly Hispanic middle school in deep South Texas. Dang! Whut language do they speak? (Yes, I know… Spanish. But my students straight from Mexico couldn’t understand the local lingo either. South Texas Spanish and Castilian Spanish from Mexico are not the same language.) I couldn’t talk to the white kids either. It is possible to communicate with Texicans, but it took me years to learn the language. It takes more than mere usage of “ya’ll” and “howdy”.

You can probably see what I mean when you look at these fake quotes based on the things real Texicans actually once said to me. Of course, I can be accused of being a racist by interpreting things this way. Texicans are concerned that you understand that they are not racists. They merely rebel against being “politically correct”. Apparently the political-correctness police give them all sorts of unfair harassment about speaking their minds the way they always have. I should note, however, that I had to use a quote from Bubba rather than Dave Winchuk. Dave is so anti-political-correctness concerned that he regularly said to me things with so much racial heat in them that they would even melt the faces off white people. Face-melting is bad. If you don’t believe me, re-watch the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

And to speak Texican, you must actually learn a thing or two about guns. Yes, Texas is an open-carry State. Apparently second amendment rights are the most important rights in the constitution. My two sons grew up in Texas, and the oldest is a Marine. Guns are important to them. I have those same arguments with former students, too. I have learned to say the right things so that they will tolerate my unholy pacifist ideas about how the world might be safer if everybody didn’t have five guns in the waistbands of their underpants. So gun-stuff ends up as a part of the Texican language I have learned to speak.

The point of it all is, language is a fascinating thing that grows and changes and warps and regresses. I love it. I try to master it. And the mistakes I make usually sound purty funny.